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Usable "Budget" RAID Solution
01/09/2012

Pros: For the money, it's fast, well supported, and does what I need it to do.

Cons: Worst user interfaces I've ever encountered, both WebBIOS and MegaCLI. If you're not running Windows or Red Hat, you're pretty well stuck administering it from those two tools, and they are awful.

But my biggest gripe is that you cannot migrate "hybrid" RAID types like RAID 10. This means if you have a RAID 1 running, and want to add a couple more disks to expand it as a RAID 1+0, you'd have to back up all your data, delete your virtual drives, and start over.

Also, drive rebuilds are appallingly slow - migrating a two drive RAID 0 to a 3 drive RAID 5 can take, literally, days. When you're stuck doing this from WebBIOS, this means your server is offline for days. Luckily we only use this for a development environment (ESXi 5), so we can stomach the downtime and hassle. But I would not accept this in a production environment, unless I was on a super budget or had a lot of redundant systems and could afford to take some down for long periods.

Other Thoughts: If you're on a tight budget and don't mind some quirks or limitations, this will get the job done. If you've been spoiled working with equipment like HP SmartArrays or enterprise class SANs, you will be frustrated by it.